The Making of The Home Treasury

Abstract

The Making of The Home Treasury Geoffrey Summerfield (bio) In 1842 and again in 1844, Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, reviewed children's books for the Quarterly Review (volumes 71 and 74). She concluded her essays by recommending a list of good children's books. At the head of her list was "The House [sic] Treasury, by Felix Summerly, including The Traditional Nursery Songs of England, Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, and other old friends, all charmingly done and beautifully illustrated." The pseudonym of Henry Cole, "Felix Summerly" was well known in Victorian England; John Stuart Mill told Cole that Summerly would someday be as "notorious" as the Brothers Grimm.1 Henry Cole himself was born in 1808. He attended Christ's Hospital, leaving it in 1823 in order to work under Francis Palgrave at the record commission. In 1838, the commission was reconstituted as the Record Office, and he was appointed one of four assistant keepers; in that year also the first of his eight children was born. As a young man he had studied watercolor painting under David Cox, had later been inspired with a passion for medieval art through his acquaintance with Francis Douce, and had maintained an active interest in music. The most influential literary figure in his life was Thomas Love Peacock in whose London home he lived with his father for some years. From Peacock he seems to have acquired equilibrium and a generous sensibility which enabled him to steer a course through the literary and philosophical quarrel of the 1830s and 1840s. Peacock also fostered his interest in opera, to which he became unashamedly addicted, and introduced him to John Stuart Mill, whom he saw frequently in the 1830s and 1840s. Peacock taught him to live two lives: a life of public service in the morning and afternoon and a personally creative life in the evenings and on weekends. He could hardly have been exposed to a more auspicious influence, and happily he had the energy to do justice to both his vocation and his avocation. Cobden was so impressed [End Page 35] by his energy and ability that he tried to persuade him to become secretary of the Anti-Corn Law League. But by that time he was up to his neck in work with Rowland Hill, which led to the establishment of the Penny Post. So busy were his days that often his diary degenerates into a list of the people he had to see, ending with the admission that he was reduced to passing the evening in "napping." Only once, in February 1843, does he admit that he is trying to pack too much in. "I have not worked much of late," he wrote, "because I have found my head full and aching." Throughout the early 1840s most of his spare time was devoted to editing and producing "Felix Summerly's Home Treasury," the series of children's books which, together with a number of contemporaneous works, marked the emergence of emphatically non-didactic books for children. Not only did The Home Treasury help establish such books as worthy of serious acceptance, but it helped to place the printing, illustration, and production of children's books on a new footing.2 Cole's model seems to have been Blake's Songs of Innocence, which he at one time hoped to include in the Treasury. It was against the background offered by Elizabeth Rigby's essays that Cole wrote his prospectus for The Home Treasury: The character of most Children's Books published during the last quarter of a century is fairly typified in the name of Peter Parley,3 which the writers of some hundreds of them have assumed. The books themselves have been addressed after a narrow fashion almost entirely to the cultivation of the understanding of children. The many tales sung or said from time immemorial, which appealed to the other, and certainly not less important elements of a little child's mind, its fancy, imagination, sympathies, affections, are almost all gone out of memory, and are scarcely to be obtained. Little Red Riding Hood, and other fairy tales hallowed to children's use, are now...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.